[CHAPTER VI]
A NEW REGIME
Present system faulty everywhere—Reforms contemplated—Too great intercourse among prisoners condemned—Labour for the spiritual welfare of the prisoners becomes a leading idea—Unwearied zeal and activity of the chaplain—Succeeded by Mr. Nihil who combines the offices of chaplain and governor—Admonition and persuasion are the leading principles of the new Penal Discipline—The chaplain-governor’s difficulties and vexations.
We now come to another stage in the onward career of the Penitentiary. The committee, compelled to admit that the discipline was not sufficiently severe, resolved to tighten the reins. In order to understand this decision we must take into consideration certain influences at work outside the walls.
There was, about this time, a sort of panic in the country at the alarming prevalence of crime in England. Its continuous and extraordinary growth was certainly enough to cause uneasiness. In the years between December, 1817, and December, 1831, it had increased one hundred and forty per cent. For this there was more than one reason, of course. One, and no insignificant cause, was the comparative immunity enjoyed by offenders. It came now to be understood that the lot of the transgressor was far from hard. The system of secondary punishments in force for their correction was felt to be inadequate, either to reform criminals or deter from crime. Here was an explanation: evidently a screw was loose in the way in which the sentence of the law was executed. The judges and the juries did their duty, but the criminal snapped his fingers at the ordeal to which they subjected him. This discontent with the system of imprisonment grew and gained strength, till at last the whole question of secondary punishments was referred to a Select Committee of the House of Commons.
All prisoners found guilty of non-capital crimes were at that time disposed of by committal for short periods to the county gaols and houses of correction, or they were sentenced to transportation for various terms of years. Those whose fate brought them within the latter category were further disposed of, according to the will of the Home Secretary, in one of three ways: either, by committal to Millbank Penitentiary; or, by removal to the hulks; or, finally, by actual deportation to the penal colonies beyond the seas. There were therefore four outlets for the criminal. How he fared in each case, according as his fate overtook him, I shall describe hereafter.
The county gaols were in these days still faulty. They made no attempt to reform the morals of their inmates, nor could they be said to diminish crime by the severity of their discipline. Indeed, they held out scarcely any terrors to offenders. Of one of the largest, Coldbath Fields, Mr. Chesterton, who was appointed its governor in 1829, speaks in the plainest terms. “It was a sink of abomination and pollution. The female side was only half fenced off from the male—evidently with an infamous intention; its corrupt functionaries played into each other’s hands to prevent an inquiry or exposure. None of the authorities who ruled the prison had acquired any definite notion of the wide-spread defilement that polluted every hole and corner of that Augean stable. Shameless gains were promoted by the encouragement of all that was lawless and execrable.” The same writer describes Newgate, which he visited, as presenting “a hideous combination of all that was revolting.” The thieves confined therein smoked short pipes, gamed, swore, and fought through half the night: the place was like a pandemonium. Again, when he saw them, “The prisons of Bury St. Edmund’s, Salford, and Kirkdale created in my mind irrepressible disgust. I wondered why such detestable haunts should be tolerated.” Gaolers and criminals were on the best of terms with each other. At Ilchester the governor was in the habit of playing whist with his prisoners, and at Coldbath Fields the turnkeys shook hands with new arrivals and promised to take “all possible care” of them. With all this there was such a deficiency of control that unlimited intercourse could not be prevented, and there followed naturally that corruption of innocent prisoners by the more depraved which was a bugbear even in the time of John Howard.
Indeed, it was a wonder that Howard did not rise from his grave. Half a century had elapsed since his voice first was heard, and yet corrupt practices, idleness, and wide-spread demoralization characterized the greater part of the small prisons in the country. Herein were confined the lesser lights of the great army of crime, and if they escaped thus easily, it could not be said that the more advanced criminals endured a lot that was much more severe. The reader has, perhaps, some notion by this time of the kind of punishment to be met with in the walls of the Penitentiary; the hulks, too, have already been mentioned. The third method of coercion, by transportation, that is to say, beyond the seas, remains to be described; but this I reserve for a later page, recording only here the opinion of the committee of 1831, that as a punishment transportation held out to the dangerous classes absolutely no terrors at all. “Indeed, from accounts sent home, the situation of the convict is so comfortable, his advancement, if he conducts himself with prudence, so sure, as to produce a strong impression that transportation may be considered rather an advantage than a punishment.”
After a long and careful investigation, the committee wound up their report with the following pregnant words: “Your committee having now passed in review the different modes of secondary punishment known to the practice of this country, wish once more to direct the attention of the House to their obvious tendency. If it is a principle of our criminal jurisprudence, that the guilty should escape rather than the innocent suffer, it appears equally a principle, in the infliction of punishment, that every regulation connected with it, from the first committal of a prisoner to gaol to the termination of his sentence of transportation, should be characterized rather by an anxious care for the health and convenience of the criminal than for anything which might even by implication appear to bear on him with undue severity.”